Category Archives: Egyptian films

The cinemas of Casablanca

On February 17, 2015, I met Abdellatif Labbar in the old theater district, a stone’s throw away from the Rialto. This delightful gentleman who used to program the films that were screened in Casablanca, reminisced about the golden age of cinemas in his fast-changing city and explained why Indian films were screened in Morocco.

Cinema Rialto
Cinema Rialto

“I was in charge of programming the films to be screened in Casablanca. There were over two hundred movie theaters in the Kingdom. Today we only have a little over fifty screens…” [fifty-seven, according to the Centre Cinématographique Marocain]. “Too much piracy and too little interest perhaps… People have changed… Look at the many old cinemas of Casa: the Rialto, the Vox, the Empire, the Colisée, the Lux, the Verdun… most of them are closed now, although in theory, a movie theater cannot be closed.

In the old days, we programmed films from the US, France, Italy, from all over Europe, but also, of course, a lot of Egyptian films. People loved swashbuckling films, American westerns. Each time we screened a film by Charlie Chaplin, it was always a hit! And it was a hit for a long time: people adored him! Some of the oldies, like Ben Hur or the films with Sidney Poitier were so popular they had a five-week run, especially in the summer… There were other sorts of hits: I remember Z by Costa-Gavras (1969), in particular. It arrived on Moroccan screens only in 1972. But the censors took it down on its second day of release. Too politically charged after the failed attempted coups against Hassan II [the Skhirat coup on July 10, 1971 and the aborted putsch of August 16 1972, dubbed “le coup d’état des aviateurs”]… When the film was reissued ten years later, people flocked to it! And it showed at the Rialto and the Vox for weeks on end.

Cinema dealt with language in an interesting way: the Moroccan audience saw the French versions of the films coming from the United States. Gone with the Wind, for instance, was dubbed in French. So were the westerns with John Wayne. Only a handful of French films were dubbed in darija to accommodate the local audience – Fantômas and later Fanfan la tulipe come to mind – otherwise, most French films were screened in their original versions. The same went for Egyptian films, of course. Moroccans, like other people in the Arab world, learned the Egyptian dialect via Egyptian radio (Voice of the Arabs), TV and cinema.

In 1963, however, Morocco and Algeria fought on border issues. Egypt, recently independent and led by Gamal Nasser, sided with the Algerian FLN against Morocco. In reprisals, the Kingdom broke all diplomatic ties with Egypt. As a result, we could no longer import Egyptian films. This is when Morocco started to import films from India massively, and dub them in darija. We were inundated with Indian films! Lots of Indians had moved to Tangier when it was an international city, had married Moroccan women and settled in various urban centers throughout the Kingdom. Some of their translations were hilarious!”

Florence Martin

The Petits Bonheurs of Women in Moroccan film

As Florence wrote in her blog on the death of the father in recent Moroccan films (15 March), Petits Bonheurs by Mohamed Chrif Tribak starts immediately after the death of a father and looks at the consequences for a poor widow Zineb and her seventeen-year-old daughter Nouffissa. However, the film does not reflect on this bereavement, and pragmatically looks forward at the future and dreams of a teenager in 1955 Morocco. In hindsight of course this is appropriate, as Morocco is about to gain independence, and the role of women is about to change dramatically. That this film focuses so singularly on women’s lives and roles, shows a turn in Moroccan cinema (even by men) towards the female sphere. I read a few similarities with some Tunisian films into this film.

Poster Petits Bonheurs, Cinema Colysee
Poster Petits Bonheurs, Cinema Colysee

As a widow unable to meet her and her daughter’s basic needs, Nouffissa’s mother is forced to accept the invitation from Lalla Amina, a wealthy woman, to settle at her large home. There is a suggestion that Amina and Zineb were “more than just friends” in the past. The film deals with girls’ education, domestic roles and appropriate dress sense. Within this large house in the medina of Tetouan, an ambiguous friendship parallel to Zineb and Lalla Amina’s develops between Nouffissa and Fetouma, granddaughter of Lalla Amina.

Perhaps the most interesting sequence is the group of women’s excitement about a new film with a famous, handsome actor, and their attendance at the cinema of this Egyptian melodrama. In the film, emotions run much higher than they do in Petits Bonheurs itself, but the experience of going to the cinema is a reason for excitement. The girls recall that just a few years ago they were hardly allowed to go outside. It is, as a matter of fact, Nouffissa’s first time at the cinema, and she looks in bewilderment at the screen, but also at the ‘rencontres’ between girls and boys around her. It makes her innocent outlook on love and marriage all the more endearing.

The two girls, both living under pressure of tradition moving into modernity, have divergent views. While Nouffissa does not wear the veil and Fetouma does, Fetouma embodies the rebellious girl, who rejects the idea of ​​early marriage and hopes to continue her studies, while Nouffissa would like to find a husband as she aspires upward social mobility. In this way, the film shows some parallels with Tunisian Nouri Bouzid’s Hidden Beauties (2012). Their relationship comes under pressure when Fetouma confesses she has had sex but is not interested in marriage, while Nouffissa hides from Fetouma her engagement to someone she does not know.

With exquisite detail, the film showcases the architectural, decorative and fashion trends of the 50s and 60. It also looks at both the modern and traditional styles and modes of thinking by women, and shows the power of the static camera and the reflexive, slow development of a simple, straightforward story. Careful with the male gaze, the camera and the director manage to remain unobtrusive fairly successfully, except when Fetouma acts on an instinctual and naïve act of lust on the impressionable Nouffissa.

Cinema Colysee, Gueliz, Marrakech
Cinema Colysee, Gueliz, Marrakech

The film offers a calm balance and a sense of peace with fate. While it does not totally eschew political or feminist rhetoric, it also does not foreground it. With this comes a certain risk taken by the director: the film shows some similarities with Tunisian Moufida Tlatli’s The Silence of the Palace (1994), but where Tlatli’s film is outspoken about women’s voices being drowned out by men and the uncertainties independence brings for North Africa, Petits Bonheurs seems more interested in a happy ending (see the title of the film, indicating little pleasures). I suspect this is where its accessibility lies, and its success with large local audiences. Garnering standing ovations and winning important prizes on the festival circuit inside Morocco, and being screened at the large multiplexes as well as the more discerning cinemas to large audiences, is proof of this film’s subtle yet permissible look into the past of Moroccan women. It is precisely the subtlety with which it acts that attracts a large female crowd to the cinema.

Noureddine Saïl on the cinemas of old Tangiers, languages, and happy schizophrenia! (May 7, 2016)

The philosopher and former head of the CCM (Centre du Cinéma Marocain) was in his native city to attend the 20th edition of the Salon International de Tanger des Livres et des Arts, organized by the French Institute. The theme this year was “Tangiers as a Symbolic City: from Fantasy to Reality”. Asked to address cinema in Tangiers, Saïl took a detour via the cinema houses of his childhood and teenage years. He developed a Tangerine topography of picture-houses along the two axes of space and time: the medina corresponded to early childhood; the larger city of Tangiers to teen-age years. He first evoked two old movie theaters that are now reduced to spectral architectural presences in the city: The Capitol and the Alcazar.

Noureddine Saïl (on the left) and Moumen Smihi
Noureddine Saïl (on the left) and Moumen Smihi

The Capitol specialized in westerns, and introduced the six or seven year old to John Ford and his narrative strategies, and all sorts of other American films. The films were dubbed in Spanish (the city still had its international status at the time) – so much so that Saïl would be shocked to discover, at age thirteen, that Cary Grant actually spoke English! The second theater, L’Alcazar, specialized in Spanish and Mexican romance and comedy. It was the theater where Joselito was the singing star of El Pequeño Rosiñol. The children had no clue Franquist Spain was busy spreading its messages through the charming little boy. They sang with him…

As the Tangerine children grew to reach the ripe age of ten, the circuit of movie theaters would widen and include Cinéma Vox, “the total capital of Egyptian cinema”. This is where they discovered Anwar Wagdi’s 1949 Egyptian classic Ghazal al Banat / The Flirtation of Girls, finally released in Tangier in 1957. To Saïl, this was “a complete earthquake of the senses, each component of the film having reached its utmost completeness”. The photography, the music, the dance, the range of emotions held the children under an enduring spell.

All these cinemas, Noureddine Saïl added, were part of the medina, i.e. steeped in an idyllic Tangier made of multiple cultures, languages, mores, religions, cuisines, in which people lived in a form of consensual conviviality. Stepping out of the perimeter of these picture houses through the Rue de la Liberté (sic!) meant venturing into a less colorful territory. But only there, at age fourteen, was he given the chance to see Buñuel’s surprising films at the Mauritania. This was a costly endeavor: all films at the Mauritania were twice the price of those at l’Alcazar. So the kids of Tangier would wait for “the film to come down to the Alcazar” for a couple of months, and resume their attendance at the old medina theater where the less intellectual films ended up… At the Mauritania, though, it was clearly the more complex films that attracted the teens.

“Through the Tangier of the time, we developed in a schizoid way (seeing films in all languages, speaking several ourselves) where, elsewhere, people develop in a paranoid way. Cinema was part of that.”

Florence Martin